Colorado Springs – In this city, New Life Church is one of two institutions that established the community as a conservative evangelical center in the early 1990s.

The church’s pastor, Ted Haggard, was polite and loquacious, a man with a warm smile who could talk to the president of the United States, hang up and take a call from Nori Rost, a lesbian pastor who led the Pikes Peak Metropolitan Community Church.

After reading Haggard’s letter of apology on Sunday, Rost said she was stunned that the man who used his pulpit to preach that homosexuality is a sin had confessed to “sexual immorality.”

“Even today, I still can’t believe it. It’s such a major revelation,” Rost said.

How Haggard’s fall will impact Colorado Springs is anyone’s guess. Some wonder if the tenor of conversations about homosexuality will change, or whether it will empower moderate Republicans who want to distance themselves from social conservatives.

“I think for those of us who have always had questions about this entanglement, this relationship between the Republican Party and religious organizations, maybe it will embolden or sharpen our senses,” said Marcy Morrison, a lifelong Republican and the mayor of nearby Manitou Springs.

Back in the early 1990s, Morrison says, she was the first politician in the area to be targeted by Christian conservatives. Fliers attacking her stance on abortion began showing up on the windshields of cars parked near churches on Sunday mornings.

New Life Church and Focus on the Family changed Colorado Springs, according to John Potterat, the former head of the El Paso County Health Department’s sexually transmitted disease unit.

“There are two organizations that transformed the moral landscape of the community, and they accelerated the swing toward sexual conservatism that was ushered in by the age of incurable herpes and AIDS,” said Potterat, who was one of the first public-health officials in the country to distribute condoms in gay bars. “They’ve really influenced the tone and tenor of the community. It became a much more righteous community, at least in its self-image.”

Nancy Wadsworth, an associate professor of political science at Denver University, who has studied gay-rights movements and religious conservatives, said Haggard’s case may change dialogue about whether people are born homosexual or choose it.

“I think it definitely opens up doors, not necessarily for people of his own congregation, or people firmly committed to the ex-gay agenda, but I think it opens up doors for other people in Christianity who have their doubts about whether homosexuality is a choice,” Wadsworth said.

Much, Wadsworth said, will depend on how Haggard shares his story – if he does.

“It’s such a personal and painful issue to have to deal with, particularly in evangelical Christianity,” Rost said. “He has the right to deal with it personally and privately, with his family.”

The 7,800-acre Winter Valley Fire in Moffat County was 100 percent contained Tuesday as visible smoke from interior islands showed minimal creeping behavior, according to the Bureau of Land Management.